Gallery of Home-Made Prison Escape Tools

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Gallery of Home-Made Prison Escape Tools

In the movies, prison inmates spend their time whittling chess pieces and digging escape tunnels with modded teaspoons. In real life, the forced ingenuity of the convict is turned to bleaker, more violent purposes, as we see in this gallery of Escape Tools, photographed by Marc Steinmetz back in 1999.

Some of these hacks would leave even MacGyver with his head in a spin. There's the usual something-in-a-box (in this case, a radio), but the dagger/crucifix is truly horrifying, and the immersion heater fashioned from an old kettle-lead and a few razor blades is a dazzingly innovative device for distilling hooch.

Not surprisingly, drug paraphernalia features big. The hash-pipe fashioned from an empty tube of horseradish is the favorite of BoingBoing Gadget's resident deviant, John Brownlee. What I really love, though, are the fake guns. It seems that in prison, front is everything. The lineup of fake pistols and even a submachine gun ("made from a grease injector, wood, a rubber sleeve, and tape") show that the threat of violence is as good as the real thing. Either that or the lads inside were just tooling up for an innocent game of Cowboys and Indians.